THUNDER BAY -- Zach Grzelewski and Connor Sills say Flint Firebirds owner Rolf Nilsen probably got what he deserved.
It was a toxic situation playing this past season for the Ontario Hockey League club, the players walking out on the team after Nilsen fired coach John Gruden and assistant Dave Karpa not once, but twice, for not giving his son Hakon Nilsen enough playing time.
For his meddling, league commissioner David Branch last week suspended Nilsen for five seasons and fined him $250,000.
“I’m sure some of the players would say that’s not enough, but it’s a start. You’ve got to start somewhere and hopefully it moves in the right direction from here,” said Grzelewski, the former Thunder Bay North Stars forward who spent his rookie season with the London Knights before being dealt to the Firebirds prior to last season.
Sills, whose junior career wrapped up in 2015-16, said he hopes the saga has finally come to an end, for both the players and coach’s sakes.
“Hopefully nothing comes of it and (Nilsen) doesn’t try to step in in any way or anything like that. I don’t think it’s really fair to the players that we lost one our first-round picks this year … but I guess you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” said Sills, who spent four years with the organization, including three when the team was based in Plymouth, Mich. and known as the Whalers.
Both players say the league was caught just as off guard as the players were.
“They didn’t know much about it until it happened,” said Sills, who is weighing his schooling options for next season, leaving open the possibility of a return home to play for the Lakehead Thunderwolves.
“I think they stepped in at the right time. They could have maybe taken it a little more seriously and punished him a little more seriously the first time so that it would happen a second time. But they’re stepping in now, so that’s all they can do, really.”
At the time the players decided to walk out en masse, they genuinely felt they were left with no other choice.
Hakon Nilssen clearly wasn’t good enough to earn regular ice time, collecting just four assists in 45 games, they said.
“We all pretty much had the same opinion,” said Grzelewski, who is pondering a return to Flint in 2016-17. “We all spoke up against it and decided as a team we were going to stick together as brothers and do this as a team.
“We just decided pretty much after it happened that this isn’t OK and we were going to strike up against it.”
Sills said team leaders told the players they were free to do what they wanted, but in the end everyone thought the right thing to do was walk out in protest.
“We all threw our jerseys down, said what needed to be said and it worked out. The second strike was kind of different. When they fired (Gruden) again, they couldn’t really come back, so we got new coaches. They were great too, so we just kind of did our thing and played it out.”
